walking with kings
by audacityy
Summary: Slight AU. SasuSaku, NaruSaku. You will never escape him, but truly, you don't particularly mind. Sakura-centric introspection on the two men in her life and love.


_Prompt: "you fit me better than my favorite sweater/love is mean love hurts/and baby i will love you till the end of time."_

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You will never escape him, but truly, you don't particularly mind.

You've killed hundreds with bare fists and your bloody, rusted katana; you're three quarters of the reason why Fire Country reigns in a firm, hard-won hegemony. You were on the Ops team that struck down the Akatsuki, rebirth after rebirth, you fought Danzou internally and won via sheer manipulation, and your finest achievement- you killed Uchiha Sasuke. You are one of the most powerful women in the world, undisputedly, and you are _so ridiculously lucky _that it didn't cost you everything. People usually don't believe you when you claim this, though. Never is the question direct: they search your eyes, and their doubt flickers through in their gazes. You insist, even if only to prove your contentment to yourself— you have Naruto, a Konoha that's slowly rebuilding, and most of your friends are still alive, despite all of the danger and close calls they've seen over the years. That's enough for this life.

For you.

The problem is that when people look at you, they don't see the woman who won the war. They always see flashes of barely-teenage Sakura, desperately in love with the last Uchiha, and they pity your broken heart. How it must've hurt, sliding your katana across that boy's- _never do they say "that man's"_- jugular. How upset and desolate you must be!

You'd be lying if you said that it didn't take all your strength to rip that sword across his throat. You'll never forget how tense his muscles felt, even through the steel of your sword, nor the gush of red that coated your clothes, your hands, your mind. You have a wedding band that glistens in the light now, bright and silver, but you do still love Sasuke. You look past his hollow eyes, his betrayal, his hands constricted against your throat.

All of this forgiveness? You want to say _it's simple,_ but it's really not, in any shape or form. It, however, does boil down this statement: because he was your first.

Once, his eyes were merely driven; once, he promised to watch your back. That camaraderie brought out the humanity in him that Sasuke had long fought against. That is the boy you loved. It is cliché, but the man you killed— hysterical and mirthless— wasn't him.

You're the wife to the Hokage now. Konoha, despite their doubt, was never surprised. Sasuke was never "your one".

Your marriage is not easy by any stretch of means, but it _works_. You scream about nothing and everything, raging and incoherent; the insults are always taken back via gentle kisses before they've sunken to the core. It hurts every single time, you acknowledge, but that pain is a shadow the love that accompanies it. At the end of the day, Naruto would walk to hell and back for you. Has— past tense— a thousand times over. He puts you on a pedestal and holds you up to the clear, cloudless sky; he loves you with his entire being, with everything he has to give, and together, you know you burn brighter than Konoha's fiery sun. It did not take very long for you to realize that you need Naruto, even in your adamant adolescent denial. He reminds you how to breathe.

It is worth noting that, alternatively, Sasuke was everything you wanted.

_(Everyone knows that everything you want is vastly different than everything you need.)_

You don't pretend Naruto is Sasuke. Naruto has rough hands and the softest smile, rosy and warm. He lacks Sasuke's aristocratic features, substituting the Uchiha's classic beauty with his own striking definition of the word. He is determined instead of static; he is kind, not withdrawn; he is all humanity, the will to survive.

He is yours.

If you're being honest with yourself, you know that part of you exists six feet underground with Sasuke, and that's something you can never retrieve, a piece of your heart you can never offer up to anyone else.

You will love Sasuke forever. In another life, you'd like to think that he loved you, too. The shadows instead of all the rays of the sun; a different kind of power and notoriety.

You think you would've been happy.

It's worth noting that if you could, you still wouldn't change a thing.

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**A/N: The title comes from the last stanza of Kipling's poem 'If'. I found it somewhat fitting. No beta, so I apologize for the formtting/any mistakes/general suckishness.**


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